BARD COLLEGE

Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York.Edited by Cornelia Butler, Alexandra Schwartz. Introductions by Cornelia Butler, Griselda Pollock, Aruna D'Souza.

This landmark survey represents the first effort by a major North American museum to examine its collection by highlighting the production of modern and contemporary women artists. Featuring essays by nearly 50 writers, including both MoMA curators and outside scholars, among them many of the strongest voices in current research on art and gender, this groundbreaking publication presents a variety of generational and cultural perspectives. Modern Women focuses on a diverse range of artists active from the late nineteenth century to the present whose works span the spectrum of mediums and genres in the Museum's collection. Organized chronologically into three sections—“Early Modernism,” “Mid-Century” and “Contemporary”—the book comprises both long and short essays emphasizing new research on women artists within these historical time periods. Subjects include women at the Bauhaus, design collaborations, photographers between the wars, the legacy of Maya Deren, Latin American artists, performance art, architecture, land art, “Riot Grrrls,” African American artists, collage and assemblage in contemporary portraiture as well as essays on individual artists such as Lillian Gish, Sybil Andrews, Diane Arbus, Ida Lupino, Hanne Darboven, Bridget Riley, Ana Mendieta, Louise Bourgeois, Adrian Piper, Nan Goldin, Zaha Hadid, Janet Cardiff and Lin Tianmiao. Heavily illustrated with works from the collection, Modern Women constructs a conversation between past considerations of MoMA's collection and current feminist narratives of art history, putting these varied modes of exploration in productive dialogue.

This radical new study aims to change the way that some of the most influential artists of the past 40 years are seen--all of them women. Emphasizing questions of autonomy, critical intelligence and artistic intention, Witness to Her Art presents works by Adrian Piper, Mona Hatoum, Cady Noland, Jenny Holzer, Kara Walker, Daniela Rossell and Eau de Cologne, a magazine published by gallerist Monika Sprüth. The artworks are accompanied by original writings by the artists, contemporaneous criticism and newly commissioned essays by Pamela Franks, Aruna D'Souza, Johanna Burton, David Levi Strauss, Hamza Walker and Cuauhtémoc Medina. The ambitious works presented and interpreted herein invite us to consider the impact of the feminist revolution across generations while rendering obsolete any stigma associated with shows or catalogues limited to women artists. Taking its lead from Conceptualism, feminism, and from its included artists, Witness to Her Art reaches for art history's capacity as a medium of world-making.

PUBLISHERBARD COLLEGE

BOOK FORMATPaperback, 8 x 10 in. / 336 pgs / 240 color / 76 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUSPUB DATE 3/1/2007Out of print

DISTRIBUTIOND.A.P. EXCLUSIVECATALOG: SPRING 2007 p. 67

PRODUCT DETAILSISBN 9781931493550TRADELIST PRICE: $40.00 CDN $50.00

AVAILABILITYNot available

STATUS: Out of print | 4/1/2008

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Image Stream brings together eight gallery-based film and video works, each of which explore the limits of this new medium, returning to narrative and changing conventional modes of viewing. Curator Helen Molesworth in this her first exhibition for the Wexner Art Center has selected works by Kutlug Ataman, Matthew Barney, Tacita Dean, Andrea Fraser, Pierre Huyghe, Neil Jordan, Donald Moffett and Lorna Simpson, each of which is accompanied by an individual short analytical essay. As Molesworth writes in her introduction, “the hygenic isolation of the white cube has slowly, but steadily, been overtaken by an increasingly promiscuous black box. As any turn-of-the-century member of the art public knows, darkened rooms and heavy black curtains signal the omnipresent film and/or video installation.” If an earlier generation of film and video artists were concerned with the formal properties of film, she argues, today's contemporary artists “willingly explore visual forms borrowed from both Hollywood and auteur film, as well as television, MTV, CNN and the theater. This profligate borrowing of mass-media forms has been accompanied by a strong impulse towards narrative.” It is what Molesworth calls this “reciprocity” between art world and mass culture that is a “defining characteristic of contemporary projected images.”